THE WISDOM OF WENDELL BERRY

from the BBC's webpage

You should all read the interview of Wendell Berry on Counterpunch, even though it is a bit short on detail... Berry is one of the few individuals to think, seriously, about our civilization's dependency upon cheap fossil fuel... I really do wish the interviewer had pressed Berry for hard data on the biofuels questions, since I too doubt that some kind of large-scale industrial crop-program is going to save the Machine. Hopefully it's not just David Pimentel.

And Berry does bring up the question of "How do we create an economy that makes love an economic practice?" Sure, the answer is probably not going to be in anti-industrialism, as some kind of industrial effort may in fact be necessary to clean up the mess the industrial world has gotten itself into. But it does seem to point to the sort of thing advocated by Maria Mies:

Commodity production is the goal of capitalist production, in other words, a general production of goods, everything that there is, has to be transformed into a commodity. It is possible to observe that today, especially in the course of globalization. Subsistence production has an entirely different goal, namely, the direct satisfaction of human needs. This isn't accomplished through money and the production of goods. For us, quite essential is that it is a direct production and reproduction of life. That's why we talk of "life production" rather than "commodity production."